Too close for comfort as CISF staffer spots tiger near campus

Friday noon brought with it a wild surprise for a Central Institute for Subtropical Horticulture (CISH) staffer, who spotted an elusive tiger about 500 metres away from the main campus. This is the closest the tiger has come to the CISH building, located in Rehmankheda on the outskirts of the city, till now.

“The staffer had gone to the nearby mango orchard to collect some materials when he saw the tiger some 450 or 500 metres away. One of our watchers was also nearby,” said Sitanshu Pandey, the divisional forest officer of Awadh Range, on Friday.

Tranquilising teams took just 10 minutes to reach the spot and were quick enough to set up their equipment but the tiger managed to escape. This is the first time when a staffer of the institute spotted the tiger and alarmed the forest teams.

“The pugmarks we spotted today were from minutes before. We were very close to the tiger,” said Pandey. Since the past five days, fresh pugmarks were being spotted every day, mostly in Zone One, which is an area inside and around the institute.

The first kill by the tiger, a blue bull, was made just 700 metres away from the CISH main building. The CISH campus has an experimental farm spread over 132 hectares, and the mango plantation is one of its segments.

For the next three hours, additional teams, drone cameras, two elephants and tranquilising teams carried on the combing operation. Due to a dense forest nearby, the drone cameras could not read the thermal images of the wild cat.

This was third such encounter where forest teams and the tiger were in close proximity. However, unlike on previous occasions, this time the tip-off helped the teams come very close to the wild cat.

“We have now brought more trapping cages on the institute campus,” said Pandey. One cage was shifted from Meethenagar village to the campus.

During the day, forest staff contacted villagers living around and made a few of them ‘bagh mitra’. These bagh mitra have been given task to contact forest officials as soon as they or any other villagers spot the tiger.

Villagers who were named ‘bagh mitra’ in Rehmankheda Sourced

The pugmarks at the institute campus. Sourced